A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Aiden halted by the first cute boy he saw. “What are you doing tonight?”

The boy seemed staggered. Harvard didn’t blame him. Aiden sounded rather as though he was demanding the boy’s money or his life.

“Being… heterosexual?” the boy answered at last.

Aiden stood there being gorgeous at him. A stunned and dazzled expression grew on the boy’s face, as though he’d accidentally looked directly into the sun or encountered a pinup model.

“Or maybe…not?” said the boy, a long pause between the words.

Sarah Rees Brennan’s Fence: Striking Distance is an absolute delight that frequently had me laughing and/or shrieking out loud. I went into this book wanting to smack Aiden and by the end of the book… well, okay, I still wanted to smack Aiden, but in a kind and loving way.

I loved Brennan’s characterization of Aiden and Harvard, and I thought Nicholas was pretty good (LOVED the way that his attention just slides of Aiden whenever Aiden talks; I always enjoy a character who is just not charmed by the Most Charming character), but I had some doubts about her characterization of Seiji. She presents him as just Not Getting social cues, whereas in the graphic novels I much more had the impression that he could have gotten social cues if he gave a damn, which he doesn’t.

I also loved Nancy Farmer’s A Girl Named Disaster, although I felt it very slightly fell off at the end, which seems to be almost unavoidable in the wilderness adventure genre; inevitably the character must return to civilization and I always feel like, “But do they HAVE to?” And, well, Nhamo was on the verge of starvation, so clearly she did.

The wilderness adventure parts are great, though, and they make up the bulk of the book. And it’s by no means a bad ending! Just not as exciting as Nhamo in the wilderness talking to a maybe-ghost (or maybe-dream) about how to repair her boat.

What I’m Reading Now

asakiyume! I bet Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm was the book you were thinking of last week with the walled village where people dress in traditional style, because that is ABSOLUTELY something that happens in this book! Outside is a futuristic city with flying buses and an old dump that has become a plastic mine; within the walls, a traditional village where people tell riddles to pass the time.

I’ve also been galloping through Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, you know, for a little light reading (but also research for the amount of trauma that I keep dumping on the heads of the poor benighted characters in my books, who really deserved better from life).

What I Plan to Read Next

I would like to read Fence: Disarmed, but ALAS, the library doesn’t have it yet, so I will have to make do with Sarah Rees Brennan’s earlier novel In Other Lands for now. I’ve meant to read it for ages anyway.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion! Which means I’ve finished all the Newbery Honor books of the 2000s! I must say my main reaction to this book was “I’ve read this Winter Soldier fic”: our hero Matt is a clone in a society that sees clones as less than animals, although because he is the clone of the leader of a very powerful opium empire, he ricochets between being treated like shit and feted as a princeling, which is richer whump fodder than all suffering all the time.

I also read Nels Anderson’s On Hobos and Homelessness, which in fact is not, as I thought, a reprint of Anderson’s 1924 study The Hobo, but selections from a variety of books he wrote over the years that pertain to hobos, including selections from Men on the Move, which was published in1940 and specifically focuses on Depression Era hobos, who were much more likely than tramps in earlier eras to have been forced on the road out of economic desperation. Earlier, boys and young men often hit the road out of a thirst for adventure or wanderlust; often combined with a difficult home environment or dim economic prospects, it’s true, but still it was a choice, not a case of “if we stay here we will starve.”

(The Depression is also when you start to see lone girl tramps on the road for the first time: Anderson estimates 2-3% of Depression-era tramps were girls. I’ve ordered another book on interlibrary loan, Thomas Mineham’s Boy and Girl Tramps of America, which should fill out this picture. It should be noted that in this context boy and girl both seem to extend into the early twenties.)

This book is research for a story I have percolating, which grew from George Chauncey’s observation in Gay New York that homosexuality was common and unremarkable (although not particularly respected) in tramp culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. Chauncey quotes Anderson, which led me to this book, which makes it ever more clear that this was the opposite of a romantic milieu… which doesn’t mean that I can’t write a romance novel set there, but the looming threat of sexual violence (and also just plain violence) would certainly be a thing if I do.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve been reading Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the Wars, which is about five women writers and/or scholars who lived on Mecklenburg Square in the interwar years. It’s interesting but eminently put-down-able, which is unfortunate because six people have it on hold and I really ought to finish it so they can have a crack at it.

Here’s a fun historical fact from the book: “by 1921 the subject was seen as dangerous enough for parliament to debate making lesbianism (associated with over-education, prostitution, alcohol, nightclubs, divorce, and vampires) a criminal offense like male homosexuality, but the question was shelved on the basis that women might not have considered the concept and it was preferable not to put ideas into their heads.”

I’ve also been reading Joan Weigall Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is very much not the book I expected, although God knows what I did expect, because all I knew about the story was that one still from the 1975 film with the girls from the boarding school standing about Hanging Rock in their fluttering white dresses. I think I expected it to be more focused on the boarding school and the mystery of the girls’ disappearance and perhaps more scary? But instead it’s very diffuse and only intermittently about the boarding school, which isn’t bad exactly, but disappointing to me because I love boarding school stories.

What I Plan to Read Next

Gerald Durrell’s Fillets of Plaice seems to be stuck in some kind of hold limbo. C’mon, Fillets of Plaice! Arrive already!